Better child well-being policies with better data: New OECD Child Well-being Dashboard and updated Data Portal Chris Clarke (chris.clarke@oecd.org) and Olivier Thévenon (olivier.thevenon@oecd.org), Centre on Well-being, Inclusion, Sustainability and Equal Opportunity (WISE), OECD
G
ood policies need good data, and policies aimed at improving the well-being of children are no exception. Developing policies that promote children’s wellbeing requires sound information on multiple areas of their lives, including their material living standards, their health, their social lives and their education and learning (OECD, 2021). Data on the settings and environments in which children grow up – their families, their schools, their communities and their local areas – are important too, given growing evidence on the importance of these environments as drivers of well-being. The good news is that data on children’s well-being have come a long way in recent decades (OECD, 2021). At the international level, the growth of large-scale child-centred data collections have helped push forward what we know and understand about many aspects of children’s lives. At the national level, in many countries, a growing number of country-specific surveys and datasets have helped do something similar. But the growth of information on children and their lives raises new challenges: how to make sense of the range of information that is now available, and how to monitor how children are actually doing across the many areas that matter for their well-being? With this in mind, the OECD has recently released two data-focused resources – an updated OECD Child Well-being Data Portal, and a new OECD Child Well-being Dashboard – that aim to help countries better understand how they are performing on child well-being. The OECD Child Well-being Data Portal and OECD Child Well-being Dashboard The OECD Child Well-being Data Portal is the OECD’s hub for comparative data on child well-being. It is structured based on the OECD Child Well-being Measurement Framework (OECD, 2021), and it builds on the latest available data from OECD databases
and a range of leading international child surveys and data collection programmes. The updated Data Portal contains over 200 comparative measures on child wellbeing outcomes and drivers of well-being stemming from children’s environments. Data are available where possible for all OECD Members and Partners, OECD Accession countries, and EU Member states. Complementing the Data Portal, the new OECD Child Well-being Dashboard is a tool for policy makers and the public to monitor countries’ efforts to promote child wellbeing. The Dashboard uses a selection of key indicators from Data Portal, to provide a broad picture of how countries are performing on child well-being, both in comparison to other OECD countries and for different groups of children within a country. The Dashboard contains 20 key internationally comparable indicators on children’s well-being outcomes across four core areas – material well-being; physical health; cognitive and educational well-being; and social and emotional well-being. It also contains contextual indicators on key drivers of child well-being and childrelevant public policies. Wherever possible, to help countries monitor well-being inequalities across groups of children, data are provided both for all children and disaggregated by key demographic and socio-economic characteristics, including gender, migrant status, and household income or socio-economic status. Indicators for the Dashboard have been selected based on their importance both for children’s well-being now and for their development, skills and well being outcomes in later life. While the Dashboard looks to cover the wellbeing of children of all ages, limitations in data availability mean that most indicators focus on those in the middle of their childhood and adolescence. The well-being of disadvantaged children The OECD’s recent policy paper Starting Unequal: How’s Life for Disadvantaged Children? (OECD, 2022)
Issue No. 76, July 2022 - The OECD Statistics Newsletter
3
